Osbat al-Ansar

Osbat al-Ansar was a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group which was founded in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp of Sidon, Lebanon in 1986. Its first leader was Hisham Shreidi, and it had the goal of creating an Islamic state in Lebanon. In the mid-1990s, Osbat al-Ansar assassinated religious leaders and bombed nightclubs, theatres, and liquor stores, and it came to share al-Qaeda's ideology and support al-Qaeda in Iraq. Osbat al-Ansar had 2,000 members by 2014.